but if you make a youtube stunt that hurts nobody you can get 20 years in prison and the FAA acts like you besmirched the stellar reputation of the aviation industry.
It's rather irritating. The law was made with a flexible range of punishments to permit the judge of any particular case to use discretion when determining an appropriate punishment. The maximum permitted is thus rather high. So now every article written about the subject lazily cites "up to 20 years", and thus everyone reading those articles gets the impression that he's actually likely to get 20 years for this incident.